Constraints
Migrant population is difficult to identify and locate
Some community members cannot attend, e.g. daily
workers, or women having to take care of children
Assessment fatigue
Access to remote locations
Power struggles in communities; parts of communities
are uncooperative; others are silenced
Language problems
Possible solutions
Provide incentives to come to an initial meeting. Jointly
decide a good location for meetings and the timing of
household assessments
Provide incentives, e.g. food or childcare when attending
meeting
Obtain baseline data from elsewhere; agree joint
assessments with other agencies
Share logistics with other agencies; get the Cluster to
coordinate and support assessments
Divide communities into groups that share similar
interests; illicit the views of all members, by facilitating
meetings well
Use local staff; get community members involved who
speak several languages
What should a needs and resources
assessment cover?
There has been far more written on the assessment
of the immediate needs of people affected by
disasters for relief purposes, than there has
on the assessment of long-term needs such as
livelihoods recovery and reconstruction. However,
a lot of information exists on participatory
needs assessment, participatory learning and
action (PLA), participatory rural appraisal
(PRA) and community action planning (CAP)
that can be applied to a post-disaster context.
Communities may have had experience with some
of these approaches prior to the disaster. This
experience, alongside the recruitment of local
staff knowledgeable in such approaches can help
reconstruction agencies to facilitate the assessment
more effectively. Reconstruction planning must
relate to the needs and resources assessment as
well as the assessments of vulnerabilities, risks and
damage caused by the disaster (as explained in
PCR Tool 3: Learning from Disasters).
This tool does not describe how to perform
particular actions or methods as these are already
well documented in the approaches listed above
(the Resources section at the end of this tool gives
more details about methodologies). Instead, it
points out the methods that are most relevant for a
post-disaster context:
• Mapping of an area – this could be used to
describe both the present situation and gain
an idea of the pre-disaster context if people
are willing to discuss this. Maps could indicate
where households are/were living, and where the
main infrastructure or facilities are/were located.
The exercise could be extended to document
property rights in more detail, for example to
mark who owns certain pieces of land and what
the relations are between landlords and tenants.
This is a tool predominantly used within rural
development, but also favoured by Shack/
Slum Dwellers International and its affiliated
organisations such as SPARC and Homeless
International in their work on slum upgrading.
In the latter case, it is often used together with
enumeration, in which community members
themselves survey the shacks and other assets
of people living in the settlements (see, for
example Patel, or Schilderman & Ruskulis, in
the Resources section). Mapping can be done
using pens and sheets of paper, or using sticks
and stones on the ground. The facilitating
fieldworker should photograph them, when
finalised, to keep a permanent record.
• Transect walk – a walk around the damaged
settlement with a representative group of
community members. This is useful to check
previous damage assessments (as documented
in the Initial Report and Interim Reports) and
Street in Moquegua, Peru after the 2001 earthquake. Some
houses appear to have little damage, but the one in front has
lost its roof and may have to be rebuilt.
3